The Eighth Door
by EmmBee
Summary: Emma Green's life goal is to be invisible. But when a cryptic note from her missing father leads her through the Eighth Door, Emma discovers a destiny greater than any she could have imagined. *SLEEPING, NOT DEAD*
1. Different

**Author's Note: Once upon a time, there was a university student who signed up for a Creative Writing class. One day, that class began with a prompt: a picture of an elaborate door in an empty hallway, opened slightly, with the caption that read only "Enter Here." The student was given 10 minutes to write about the door, and she was so intrigued by the image that she was unable to let it go. Now she hopes, dear reader, that you will enjoy the journey as much as she is.**

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Emma Green always knew she was different from other children. The first day of school, everyone in her class—the kindergarten class, full of five- and six-year-olds—took one look at her and shuddered away, some of them tugging on their parents' hands or shirts, pointing, and asking what was wrong with her. The adults were slower at recognizing it, perhaps because they were all so much taller than she was and so had a harder time meeting her eyes. But then they, too, winced away from her, telling their children not to stare even though they were still gaping, openmouthed, at her.

Her father squeezed her hand and glared at the adults around him. "What are you staring at?" he demanded, his voice hard. The parents around him closed their mouths and dropped their eyes.

Emma was still too young to understand what the problem was, too young to see what they saw, even when she looked in the mirror. _Doesn't everyone look like this_? she thought. After all, she had all her features like a normal girl: two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, a chin, plenty of hair. So why did people recoil from her as though she were poisonous?

It was only after her father finally caved to her mother's suggestion of buying contacts that Emma began to understand. They discussed it often the year she started school, sometimes heatedly. It was the only time Emma could remember them fighting.

"It'll help, Marty. People won't be so…unnerved by her."

"Her eyesight is perfect. She doesn't need contacts."

"Not for the eyesight. You can get ones just for the color."

"What are you saying, that you don't like the color of Emma's eyes?"

"That's not what I mean. If the world was just us, I'd never dream of suggesting it. But it's not. And it unnerves people. It always has, and I imagine Emma won't like that before long."

Her father blew out a long breath. It was almost a year before he agreed to it.

Emma was only seven the day her mother taught her how to wear contacts. They were uncomfortable at first, but she got used to them and soon rather enjoyed the difference they made. Her mother was right: people didn't stare when her eyes were green.

For a year or so, Emma thought she was normal.

And then her best friend, Sophie Turner, invited her to her eighth birthday party.

The day started innocently enough. Her parents dropped her off outside of Sophie's building, chasing her in with the order to be good and wear her hat if she went outside to protect her ears from the biting November wind. Emma waved them on impatiently, eager to escape them for a few hours, then, once they had driven out of the parking lot and turned onto the highway, spun around and sprinted up the steps to the Turners' apartment.

The rooms smelled like fresh paint and new drywall. The missus was an interior designer and had been contracted by the landlord to refurbish the apartment, and the entryway into the apartment was piled with neatly-stacked cans of paint, rollers, pans, brushes, and several unopened rolls of wallpaper.

Sophie flounced over to her. "Don't look, that's Mom's stuff," she said, taking Emma's hand and tugging her away.

Emma smiled. "You should see what my daddy like to do."

Sophie smiled back. "I have. He made me my little toy car, remember?"

Emma wasn't the only one invited to Sophie's birthday party. There were several other girls there: Mary-Ellen and Cindy-Lou Newport, Betty Thomas, Ashley Procter, Sara McGraff—all friends from school. They greeted her with shouts and hugs, and all of them jabbered excitedly about games and cake and compared the sizes of their presents. Emma felt as proud as a queen when Sophie squealed over the bright green bracelet Emma had made for her, the bracelet that had, between the braiding and the beading, taken nearly a week to finish and had pushed Emma's limited patience beyond all breaking points. They ate cake and ice cream until they were stuffed, then played Hide-N-Seek and Telephone. Everything was going wonderfully.

But then, during the final round of Musical Chairs, Ashley shoved Emma away from the last chair and won the game.

It was such a stupid thing to lose her temper over, and Emma regretted the moment every time she thought about it. But—though it was no excuse, certainly, because there really was no excuse for her reaction—she was angry at Ashley for cheating, and, back then, she didn't really understand just how different she was.

Sophie's party wasn't the first time she had done it. The first time had been several summers previous, on a hot, sticky day while she and her father had sweated on their living room couch. "Why don't you find us a breeze?" he had said, grinning in the peculiar way he had, as though he had just told a really excellent joke.

Emma had still been too young to disagree with him and went hunting for a breeze, just as he suggested, only a little surprised to feel air move against her face in the next moment.

Her father sighed. "Thanks, kiddo."

Since then, on hot days when they were alone in a place, she would find a breeze to cool them down. It was natural: she thought about how much she wanted a breeze, and a breeze would appear, easy as breathing. She had never thought that it wasn't something everyone did.

But the wind that tore apart the Turners' apartment was not a little breeze on a hot day; it was a full-out windstorm, a howling, raging beast of wind that nearly stripped the apartment down to its support beams. Her friends screamed as they tossed about in that ferocious wind, and she would later imagine herself standing perfectly still and absolutely furious in the middle of the room, as conspicuously responsible for the windstorm as a murderer standing over a body holding a smoking gun.

Mrs. Turner screamed at her to stop whatever she was doing, that she was going to hurt someone, before a Kleenex box that had been picked up by the wind had shoved itself into her wide-open mouth. It was a miracle, with the way things, heavy things like lamps and books, were being tossed around, that no one was hurt.

When she cooled down, the wind died to nothing, leaving everyone breathless and windblown and terrified, and the Turners' apartment looking like a tornado had swept through it and overturned everything that wasn't bolted to the floor.

Emma was not forgiven, even after her sincerest eight-year-old apology, and her friends did not speak to her again beyond flaunting the story to everyone else in the school.

Her mother scolded her when she was finally able to make out Mrs. Turner's broken explanations of what had happened. "You must never lose your temper like that, Emma. Someone could have gotten hurt!" she shouted.

Emma hung her head, letting her hair hide her face. "I said I was sorry."

"You're lucky no one got hurt. You know what would happen if this gets reported to the police? You'd be taken away. Put in another home. Is that what you want?"

Emma gaped, horrified by the thought.

"Now, Karen, there's no reason to lie to her," her father interrupted in his most reassuring voice. "You wouldn't be taken away, Emmy, of course you wouldn't. Do you think either your mother or I would let anyone take you away from us? Because of course we wouldn't." He wrapped her up in a big, warm hug, the kind that only daddies can give.

Her mother "hmphed" like she did when she was out of things to say but still needed to sound parental. Emma buried her face in her father shoulder to hide her cracking smile.

Her life was never right after Sophie Turner's eighth birthday; some line had been crossed, some pact broken. In school, people ogled her just as they had her first day of kindergarten, even though her eyes were green now. Her name was replaced by the word "freak" so often that she stopped noticing it after a year or two, stopped trying to make everyone see her as the girl she had been before Sophie's party. It was impossible. There was no going back.

Emma had always known that she wasn't normal, but it was that incident, that windstorm in the middle of the Turners' apartment, that really drove the fact into the center of her being.

Emma Green was not normal.


	2. Loved

Emma walked home from school alone.

She saw Sophie in the parking lot but didn't call to her. They hadn't talked in ten years. Even if she had said something, Sophie was so busy Frenching her boyfriend on the hood of his brand-new blue BMW that she probably wouldn't have heard. Rick had not stopped going on about his shiny new car all week, and the sight of it had Emma itching to toss a few pebbles at it and ding up that mirror-like paintjob. What good did a snazzy two-wheel-drive car do in Vergennes, anyway? He'd regret the decision when winter hit in earnest. But Emma only grabbed the dangling ends of her backpack straps and swung her arms out in front of her. As far as she knew, she didn't have any strange power over anything but wind, but with the story of Sophie's eighth birthday party still hanging over her head like a guillotine on a frayed rope, she figured it would be best not to risk it: flicking pebbles at Rick's car might dredge up the gossip again.

Her classmates had finally moved on to other, newer, juicier topics of conversation; she hardly wanted to give them a reason to remember her.

Mary-Ellen and Cindy-Lou Newport and their constant cloud of freshman worshippers flocked by Emma, chattering at each other. As they passed her, Mary-Ellen nudged her sister and jerked her chin Emma's way, and the entire group fell silent for half-a-second before bursting into hyena laughter and walking away.

Emma thought she should be used to such treatment—surely ten years was long enough for a body to get used to anything—but it still stung. She swung her arms, still connected to the dangling straps of her backpack, in front of her again, humming to distract herself from the loneliness that flared in her chest, and turned out of the high school parking lot.

It was a cold November day, cloudy and windy and raw, the sort of day that made her wish her mother would pick her up from school. But Mom didn't believe in using the car more than she had to. "We're in the middle of a global oil crisis," she'd say, "and there's twenty-thousand years'-worth of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and I'm not compounding the problem so that you don't have to walk ten minutes across town."

So, every day, fair weather or foul, she walked to school. Emma had long since given up trying to argue the point, even though it would take fifteen round trips to the school and back to use up even one gallon of gas.

But, today, she wished her mother had caved and agreed to pick her up. She didn't like the way the wind was howling, blowing through the trees and across the roads like it was in pain, or it wanted to cause pain to some unassuming victim. The sound made her skin prickle, like she was covered all over in goosebumps, made the small hollow place in the very deepest part of her chest twist and ache.

Emma stuffed her out-of-control hair into her hood and pulled the drawstring tight, jammed her hands into her jean pockets, and hurried home, refusing to think about anything but the warm, brightly-lit kitchen waiting for her.

Mom was sitting at the table when she got in, an old, battered copy of _National __Geographic_ in her hand. "Hey, girly," she said without looking up. "How was school?"

Emma shrugged and dropped her backpack to the floor, then turned toward the fridge for some milk. "All right. Mr. Beckhoff nearly passed out in Bio when he was showing us how to dissect our frogs." She smiled and guzzled half her glass of milk in one swallow. "Guess he was one of those kids who opted for the term paper in high school Bio."

Mom chuckled. Emma could almost hear the amazement in her thoughts—how someone could be against tearing into the flesh of a dead animal in the name of science probably baffled her.

Emma chugged the rest of the milk and leaned against the counter. The kitchen was a small, homey room, the appliances just a little too old, the fake tile floors—the kind that came in large rolls and looked like a black-and-white plastic checkerboard—just a little torn and discolored. The yellow walls needed to be repainted; the wallpaper border, Americana chickens that hugged the middle of the walls, was lumpy and peeling. The tablecloth over the kitchen table hadn't been changed since Halloween and still sported grinning jack-o'-lanterns splashed across a vivid orange background. A half-dozen or so ladybugs clumped together in the corner above the window.

Outside, gray clouds boiled in the wind, but the kitchen was safe and warm and cheerful.

"Oh," Mom said after a moment, as though just remembering, "and that _cat_ of yours left you a little present on the carpet. I got most of it, but you'll have to scrub the stain out of the carpet before it sets."

Emma rolled her eyes and wandered down the hall toward the living room. "Salem?" she called, dropping to her knees by the couch and peering beneath it. The place was all blackness and shadow; then one shadow opened its large yellow eyes and hissed at her, exposing sharp white teeth and a pink tongue. "Have you been not using your litter box, you bad animal?"

A twitch of tail.

"You don't want Mom to put you back out, do you?"

A low growl.

"Then you'd better stop having accidents."

Another hiss.

"Oh, all right, I'll leave you be." Emma stood, grabbed the carpet cleaner and paper towels she had stashed for just this purpose beside the end table, and set to scrubbing the brownish stain Salem had left in the middle of the cream-colored carpet.

Later that afternoon, the carpet clean and the smell of cooking steak hanging in the house, she plunked down on the couch with her textbooks, intending to do her homework, but her attention wandered. The wind moaned around the corners of the house. If she listened hard enough, she could almost make out familiar patterns in the moans—patterns that almost sounded like words. Not just words—pleas. Desperate pleas for help, for quick and easy deaths.

Emma bit her lip, unable to tear her eyes off the twisting shapes of bare tree branches in the wind. Her chest throbbed painfully, at a different, faster, tempo than her heart.

Salem slunk from his hiding place and, leaping soundlessly onto the couch, curled up on her lap. She breathed out, a long, slow breath she didn't realize she had been holding, and stroked him cautiously. Fickle cat—ten minutes ago, he had been prepared to quite happily claw out her eyeballs. She rubbed his neck and tried again to focus on her Bio questions.

The rain started a minute later, sheeting, cold November rain that scraped like ice or fingernails at the window panes. Emma sighed. She hated November.

Headlights swung through the window, and the noise of tires on wet gravel pierced through the moaning of the wind. Emma flung aside her textbook, scooped Salem into her arms—ignoring it when he growled and batted her hand in protest—and hurried toward the door. "Oh, stop it, you stupid cat," she scolded when Salem squirmed and hissed. "You're fine."

Salem wiggled out of her grasp and fell to the floor, hissed again, and darted out of the room. Emma had to laugh as she dabbed at the bloody claw-marks on the back of her hand. Anyone who thought cats made good pets had clearly never met her bad little Bombay.

Her attention shifted back to the door almost immediately, her anticipation and impatience mounting. This was her favorite part of the day, and she was eager for it, ready to shake off the bad feelings left by her classmates today, ready for the warmth of her daily daddy hug to chase away the depression brought on by the wretched November weather.

The doorknob turned with deliberate, almost painful, slowness, then the door opened and admitted her father into the house. "Daddy!" Emma shrieked, launching herself across the room and throwing her arms around her father, who barely had time to put down his briefcase before she tackled him.

He chuckled and swung her around, grunting as he picked her off her feet. "You're getting too big for me, kiddo," he whispered in her ear, as he had every afternoon since she was six. Still, it never hindered their home-from-work routine for so much as a day, so Emma never really noticed it—his complaining about her size was simply part of the routine. She hoped he would never really mean it.

Mom peered out from the kitchen. "Marty, you're going to pull out your back doing that," she scolded as he set Emma back on her feet.

He dropped his arms and bent to pick up his abandoned briefcase. "It's my job, Karen. Part of the whole father package."

Emma giggled. Her parents never changed.

"How was work?"

"Ugh. What's for dinner?"

"Steak and baked potatoes."

He grinned and winked at Emma. "We Greens are the quintessential all-American family." He walked into the kitchen to kiss Mom, removing his wet coat and tossing it onto a chair. "I had an unbelievable find today: an old car engine. Jim took a look at it and said it was vintage Model T. Model T! Don't worry, Karen, it's not anywhere around here, I left it in his garage. We're gunna start taking it apart tomorrow after work. How 'bout you?" He glanced idly at the _National Geographic_ Mom was reading. "Find anything worth mentioning about—" he peered at the title page—"the ice man cometh-ing?"

"Cometh-ing?" Emma repeated, sticking potatoes into the microwave.

"Well, nothing as exciting as a vintage Model T engine," Mom answered, a touch of lighthearted sarcasm in her tone.

_Quintessential all-Americans indeed,_ Emma thought with a smile.

"Hey! Cat!"

Salem streaked beneath Dad's legs, nearly tripping him, and leapt onto the kitchen counter near where Emma stood. He closed his eyes and rubbed his head against her arm.

"Dinnertime?" she asked him. "All right, get down." She knocked him off the counter and poured him a cup of food from the cookie tin behind the sink.

Mom mumbled something about getting rid of "that unpredictable creature" but only smiled and shrugged when Emma looked at her.

They ate their steak and potatoes in the usual cheerful chatter about schoolwork and office work, ice men and Model T's, then Mom sent Emma into the living room to do her homework, and Dad trailed after her.

"Biology tonight?" he said.

Emma screwed up her nose and nodded.

"Fascinating stuff, your biology. I never could get my head around metal-based blood cells."

Emma smiled. "Yeah, it's pretty weird to think about, little bits of metal running around in your blood."

He thumped his chest once and shook his head. "No metal here," he said.

"Don't be silly, Dad. You've got iron in your blood just like every mammal in the world."

"Oh." Emma watched with some surprise as he flushed. "You're right, I guess I do. Right. Iron. Of course." He looked away from her and turned on the TV, flipping channels until he stumbled across some X-Treme competition, which he watched with enthusiasm. "Look at that bike," he sighed at one point, interrupting Emma's battle with frog anatomy. "Balanced and perfectly aerodynamic. I'd kill to get my hands on one."

"And what would you do with it, jump off ramps?" Emma wondered.

He grinned. "Your mother wouldn't appreciate that."

"No, she wouldn't."

"Still, how cool would that be?" His voice dropped an octave in an impressive imitation of a sports commentator. "Martin Green, X-Treme biker champion."

Emma snorted and returned to studying the frog diagram.

By the time she was finished her homework, Mom had wrestled for and won control of the remote, and the X-Treme competition had been traded for the nightly news. "Boringest stuff in the whole realm," Dad complained. "I don't understand why you watch the news when you could be watching just about anything in the world."

Mom smiled at him and kissed his cheek in the spot where she had accidentally smacked him with the remote. "Because it's good to be informed. And, anyway, not everyone is as fascinated with machines as you are."

Dad mumbled unintelligibly.

Emma stood and stretched. "I'm going to bed."

"G'night," Mom said, already drawn into CNN's story of rising oil prices in the Middle East.

But Dad held out his arms and hugged her tight. "Night, kiddo," he said, kissing her cheek. "Sweet dreams."

Emma went upstairs, to the bathroom for a shower. She pulled out her contacts and winced at the reflection in the mirror. With green eyes—or brown, which she tried for a while in middle school and liked, though she really thought green was her color—she was alright-looking. Not gorgeous, but passable. Straight nose, shoulder-length red-brown hair in wild loose ringlets, reasonably clear skin with just a dusting of freckles on the bridge of her nose. As long as her eyes were green, she wasn't particularly conspicuous. But the moment her contacts came out…

Emma looked down and frowned.

Her colorless irises weren't just abnormal—they were impossible. Even albinos, true albinos who didn't have any pigments in their skin or hair or eyes, had red irises from all the blood vessels in the eyes. But her eyes weren't even red. They were colorless, clear as a polished windowpane, impossible and strange.

She turned to start her shower, keeping her gaze resolutely on the black-and-white bathroom tiles.


	3. Gone

"Emma, if I were to run to the store to get some rice, would you make stir fry?"

Mom's question jerked Emma's attention away from the window, from the bare tree limbs twisting and quivering in the wind. "Oh, yeah, sure," she said.

Mom set down her reading material, a scientific paper so dense with words there didn't appear to be any white space between them, but Dad held up his hand and stood. "It's okay, Karen, I can do that," he volunteered before she could get out of her chair.

Mom shrugged and picked her paper back up.

"Get white rice this time," Emma said as she pawed through the fridge for peppers and onions. "Wild rice isn't good for a stir fry."

Dad grabbed his coat from the back of the chair where he had tossed it when he got home and shrugged into it, then started out of the kitchen. But he paused at the entrance and stood for a long moment staring into the hallway, one hand stroking the trim that surrounded the doorless opening to the kitchen.

"Dad?" Emma said.

He started and turned back around. His eyes were misty and unfocused when he looked at her, and his lips were pressed into a tight line.

"What?" she asked.

In two large steps, he was standing directly in front of her. He looked down at her for another long moment, then very slowly bent down and kissed her forehead. "I love you, Emmy," he whispered into her hair. "You know that, right?"

Emma frowned. "Yeah. I love you, too, Dad."

"And, Karen? I love you."

"All right, Marty. If I didn't know any better, I'd think you were dying, making speeches like that. Now go get the girl her rice."

"You never know—anything could happen at any time."

"Rice, Dad."

And, as quickly as it came, the sadness fell off his face, and he smiled. "Back in a few," he promised, grabbing his car keys and walking out the door.

"That was weird," Emma said, aloud but mostly to herself.

Mom shrugged. "He's weird."

Emma focused on cutting up the peppers to shake off the feeling Dad's goodbye had left her with, the vaguely uncomfortable feeling that something in her world was not as it should be. _Dad's just being his normal weird self,_ she thought, _and I'm being stupid to make it into more than that._

Ten minutes later, the vegetables chopped and the rice cooker plugged in, Dad hadn't come back. Still, ten minutes to the store and back was pretty much the shortest amount of time one could expect. But when ten minutes turned to fifteen, then twenty, Emma started to worry. "Shouldn't he be back by now?" she asked, turning on the stove. It was one of those old gas things, and it lit with a faint whiff of propane.

Mom shrugged. "Oh, you know your father. He probably found some twisted scrap of metal on the side of the road and just _had_ to stop for it."

Emma laughed once, but the sound was off, strained and forced. "What'll it be this time? An old lawnmower? A motorcycle?"

"Who knows. It'll be something, though, just wait."

They waited. Emma sautéed the vegetables while her mother chattered at her from behind her paper, something about recumbent mitochondrial DNA—Emma didn't try to follow. The wind whistled around the corners of the house; the sound was mournful.

And twenty minutes turned to twenty-five minutes. The vegetables were cooked—nearly burned—and sitting in a bowl, looking lonely and half-formed without rice to go with them.

Emma shook her head, trying to chase away the fear that assaulted her body. Her imagination was making bad things up because it was an icy, dark November day, and her father was taking longer than he should to come home with the rice. He'd walk in the front door at any second, dripping wet and clutching some old piece of machinery.

But the fear wouldn't go away.

"I'm gonna call him," she said after a moment, reaching for the kitchen phone. "Find out what's taking so long." She dialed his cell number with shaking fingers.

The phone rang. And rang. And rang. The voicemail robot-woman answered. "Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system. Martin Green is not available…"

Emma mouthed the words along with her.

"…At the tone, please record your message. When you have finished recording, you may hang up or press 1 for more options. To leave a callback number, press 5."

"Hey, Dad, it's me," Emma said at the tone. "Just wondering what's taking so long."

"Tell him that he'd better leave whatever he finds in the garage," Mom ordered, flipping the page of her paper.

"Mom says to leave your junk in the garage when you get home. Anyway, the veggies are ready, so I hope you're on your way." She turned off the phone.

There was no real reason for him to not answer, and the uneasy feeling in her stomach got stronger.

They waited. The onions and peppers got cold in their bowl. Her mother finished reading her paper and set the table. The wind howled like a tormented beast around the house.

And Dad did not come home.

Emma tried calling him again half-an-hour later and again an hour after that. The phone went through to voicemail both times. "Dad, it's Emma. Where are you?" It was all she could get out for her third message.

They ate cereal for dinner. Mom called his cell at ten o'clock and also got through only to voicemail. "Martin Green, you are in so much trouble," she said, her voice trembling, before hanging up in a huff. "I'm going to hurt him," she mumbled.

_If he isn't already hurt._ Emma shivered.

When Dad didn't come home in the night, Mom called the cops.

Two showed up at the house later that morning. "Karen Green? I'm Shelley Pierson." The older cop, a hard-looking woman in her mid-fifties who wore her graying wheat-blonde hair in a ponytail so tight that her eyes squinted, held out her hand to Mom. "I'm in charge of the missing persons department." She then nodded to the other cop, a tall, gangly man who didn't look much older than twenty, redheaded, with a scraggly teenager beard. "This's my partner, Robert Stillwell."

Mom shook Stillwell's hand, too, then held open the door and gestured them into the house, bade them sit on the living room couch. "Thank you for coming. This's my daughter, Emma."

Emma looked away from the trees branches outside the window long enough to smile at the cops, for them to nod and smile at her.

Pierson pulled a small pad of paper and a pen from an inner coat pocket and settled it on her knees. "We understand that your husband, Martin Jeremy Green, went missing last night."

"That's right," Mom said.

"Do you have any idea where he might have gone?"

"He went to the store—to Shaw's—to get some rice for dinner and never came home."

"The Shaw's on Monkton Road?"

"Yes, of course. What other Shaw's is there around here?"

Pierson frowned. "I just want to be clear, Mrs. Green. There's no need to get tetchy."

"My husband's gone missing—I think I have every right to be tetchy," Mom shot back.

Emma snorted, then did her best to disguise the sound as a cough when the cops glanced at her. Still, it served them right. This was her father they were talking about; they ought to be a little more sensitive.

Pierson paused a moment to scribble on her pad. By leaning over the arm of the sofa and tilting her head, Emma could read what she wrote. _Shaw's, disappeared in the night, apparently no theories about where he'd gone. _Seeing the words in print made Emma shiver.

"Do you have a photo of him, Mrs. Green? The more recent, the better."

"Of course. Emma, the magazine rack in the kitchen, there's a photo there."

Emma took the hint and left the room, dug through Mom's favorite copies of _National Geographic_ for the photo. It was only a few weeks old, the photo of all three of them going to Emma's homecoming dance, Mom in a pale pink pantsuit with a string of pearls around her neck, Dad in a borrowed baby-blue tux, and Emma in a silver silk gown. She smiled. All three of them looked as natural in the finery as horses in pajamas. Still, it was a recent picture, and it was a good shot of Dad's sharp-boned face and toothy smile, so she brought it out to the cops.

"That's him?" Stillwell asked when Emma handed him the picture. He smiled down at the photo, amused. "Nice tux."

Pierson cleared her throat meaningfully, and Stillwell stopped grinning and offered her the photo. "Thank you," she said, tucking it into her pad without taking more than a cursory glance at it. "All right, Mrs. Green. I think we've got everything we need for now. We'll call you if anything turns up. Let us know if you hear anything."

Her mother stood, her hands fluttering at her chest in a gesture Emma had never seen before. "Yes, thank you," she said to the police as they stood, too, and the three of them walked to the door.

Once the cops were gone, Mom sank back into the couch and covered her face with her hands. Her shoulders shook as though she were crying, but she didn't make any sound.

Salem slunk out from under the couch and leapt onto Emma's lap, circled once, and curled up there, purring. Emma leaned over and nuzzled her face against his silky back, and, to her surprise, he didn't try to bite her.

"What do you think happened?" she whispered into Salem's fur.

"I don't know." Mom's voice was tight, muffled by her hands. "Any number of things, I suppose. But he can't be hurt, at least—we would know if he were in the hospital."

Emma shivered. The thought was not as reassuring as Mom meant it to be. Surely they would have been contacted if he were in the hospital, but that didn't mean he wasn't hurt. There were hundreds of reasons he might be injured but not in the hospital: if he were kidnapped, or mugged, or shot and discarded on the side of the road—

She shivered again and forced herself to focus on Salem's purring. It rattled in gentle counterpoint to the harsher wail of November wind. Her skin prickled and itched.

_Something's coming._ Emma could feel it in the goosebumps on her arms, the tightness in her chest, the moaning in her ears. Something was coming.


	4. Summoned

**Happy Halloween!**

**

* * *

**

Days passed. Mom was in constant communication with the missing persons department, with Stillwell and, on occasion, with Pierson herself, who was usually too important, Stillwell said, to be bothered with talking to the people on her case. But the cops hadn't turned up anything.

"They're confident they'll find him alive," Mom said when Emma came home from school on Tuesday.

"They're broadening their search to include New Hampshire and upstate New York," Mom said when Emma got off work on Thursday.

"They're sure something will turn up soon," Mom said when Emma woke up on Saturday.

But the days passed without anything. No leads, no clues, just the same constant sweeping around town, and the same knot of sick worry that grew every day in Emma's stomach.

Then the bad news came.

"They don't think they'll find him. Alive." The words came out choked, and, as she said them, Mom wiped tears off her face. Her eyes were red, like she had been crying before Emma came in the door.

Emma had been half-waiting for this moment for several days. Maybe that was why she didn't feel as shocked as she should have been—because she had been expecting this news. She wasn't shocked, not at all. She just lowered her backpack to the floor, sank into a chair, rested her forehead on the table, and cried.

On Thursday, twelve days after Dad disappeared, she clocked out from work to see Mom parked at the sidewalk. Her eyes were puffy and red, her cheeks pale, her hands where they weren't touching the steering wheel trembling.

"What's wrong?" Emma asked, and regretted the question even as it was coming out of her mouth. There was only one reason she could think of that would make her mother break down like that.

The cops must have found something.

"They called," Mom said, and her voice was shaking like her hand.

"And?" The word was barely a whisper.

"And they asked me to come to the station. And to bring you with me." Mom put the car into drive and pulled away from the curb.

Emma exhaled. If they had found something really bad—like a body—they wouldn't have requested their presence at the station. They would have gone to the house, told Mom what they had found, and let Mom tell her when she got home. So the fact they were going to the station meant they weren't about to hear that Dad had been murdered.

She hoped. She wished she had paid more attention to the police procedure in the true crime shows Dad had liked back before his passion shifted to rusty engines.

Emma trailed behind her mother through the doors of City Hall and up to the main desk, where a security guard sat reading a book. "Karen Green," she said in response to the guard's questioning look. "I'm here to see Shelley Pierson, or Robert Stillwell."

A door on the left opened before the guard could call for anyone, and Pierson poked her head out. "Come in, Mrs. Green, Emma," she called.

The security guard nodded, and they went into Pierson's office.

It was a small room, with a desk and a swiveling chair that Pierson took, gesturing Mom into the metal folding chair on the other side. A map of New England, and another of Vermont, and a third of New York, were tacked up on the wall behind Pierson. Under the Vermont one was the picture Emma had given her, of her and her parents at homecoming. They were all smiling, cheerful, happy—uncomfortable in the nice clothes, but enjoying the music and food and dancing just the same.

"Emma?"

It was only then that Emma realized Pierson had said her name more than once. "Hmm?"

"This was found on the front step this morning." She held out a piece of paper, folded in half. "It's addressed to you. We believe it may be from your father."

Emma took the paper. It was unlike any material she had seen before, thick and brown, made up of hundreds of smaller bits, like particle board. Her name, her full name, Emma Melinda Green, was scrawled across the front in familiar handwriting. The purple wax that sealed the paper shut was broken; someone—probably Pierson—had already looked at it. She flipped the paper open and read the short message scribbled on the inside.

_Sat. 11/19, 4:05 pm. 100 Flynn Ave., second building on the right. Love you._

What?

Emma stared at it for a long minute, trying to puzzle out what it was supposed to mean. It was her father's handwriting—she'd recognize that messy scrawl anywhere—but...

She read the note again. And again. It still didn't make any sense. Was he expecting her to go there?

"Well?"

The voice startled her; she had forgotten that she was still standing in Pierson's office. Both Mom and the officer were watching her, Pierson frowning thoughtfully, Mom gripping one hand in the other, her bottom lip caught between her teeth.

"It's from Dad," she said. "That's his handwriting, definitely. But…I don't know what it means."

"Perhaps he intends to meet you?" Pierson suggested.

"Well, maybe, but…I don't know. I don't understand why he wouldn't just…just _call_ or something. And I have no idea where he could've gotten the paper."

It was a minor thing, considering the enormity of the whole situation, but it was the one that really bothered her. The paper, and the purple wax that sealed it—she couldn't recognize it as being from any place she had ever seen or heard about.

"What does it say?" Mom wondered.

Emma read it aloud.

"November 19th," Mom repeated. "That's this Saturday."

"I think…I think I'm supposed to go there. Flynn Avenue, wherever that is."

"Burlington," Pierson interrupted. "Just off of 7."

Mom huffed an exasperated breathe. "But why would he send a note?"

"Truthfully, Mrs. Green, I don't think he sent it, not through the postal service, at least. There's no stamp, no mailing address. It's just your daughter's name, and it was found on the front step, not in the mailbox. Either he put it there himself, or he had someone else do it. It's all very suspicious, if you ask me."

"Suspicious," Mom echoed, her voice faint.

Pierson glanced up at Emma. "You're sure that's your father's handwriting?"

Emma nodded. "I'd bet on it."

"Then you can rest assured that he is alive, at least, or was when the note was written."

_Not comforting,_ Emma thought, but she didn't interrupt.

It was a silent drive home. Emma had asked to hold onto the note, and, to her surprise, Pierson agreed to the request, though not before she made Emma promise to keep it safe and be willing to hand it over again should the need arise. Now, sitting in the car, she stared down at the note opened on her lap, not reading it—she had already read it at least a dozen times in the last half-hour—but just staring at it. The paper, like tiny shreds of maple bark glued or pressed together, the ink barely visible on such a dark patterned background.

Mom pulled into their driveway but didn't turn off the car right away. "You can't go," she said. "There's no way to tell what's being played at, who's trying to lure you out, or why."

Emma didn't look up as she slid out of the car. "Don't worry, Mom, I'm working on Saturday."

She couldn't concentrate on her homework that night or in school the next day. Throughout the day, she kept taking the paper out of her jean pocket and looking at it, at the thin, scratchy lines of her father's handwriting—lines that, she realized, did not have the smoothness of a ballpoint pen—the strange particle-board make of the paper, the odd pool of purple wax which, when she looked closely at it, showed the remnants of a crest, a seal like something from the Middle Ages. That night, she Googled the address and got driving directions, just out of curiosity.

When she woke up on Saturday, it was raining, hard, sheets of it lashing at the windows, and Emma begged until her mother agreed to let her take the car to work.

Emma parked at the curb along Main Street and turned the car off without taking the keys out of the ignition. She peered through the rain at Three Squares where there was already a line of customers waiting for her to make them sandwiches, then glanced down at the clock on the dashboard.

It was three o'clock. If she left now, she could make it down Flynn Avenue by four. Mom wasn't even expecting her home until nine.

There really wasn't a choice; she had pretended until this point that there was to make her feel like she had some control of the situation. But there really was no choice. If her father was waiting for her, then she had to be there; if he wasn't, she had to know.

Emma turned the keys and pulled out of the parking space.


	5. Crossed

The roads were deadly wet, the visibility almost zero. Emma cranked the windshield wipers to high, and they _slap-slap, slap-slap_ped at top speed, but the rain was falling harder and faster than the wipers could handle. Lake-sized puddles lurked on the edges of the road, and small rivers rushed beneath the tires; when the wheels hit them, water struck the bottom of the car with the noise of a high-pressure hose, and the car's balance wobbled. Emma gripped the steering wheel with both hands, so tightly that her knuckles turned white and her fingers ached.

She hadn't grabbed the directions she had printed out the night before, but she had a pretty good idea of where she was going, and Flynn Avenue turned out to be pretty easy to find, one of the residential streets that branched off the highway just south of downtown.

She drove past house after house, straining through the rain and growing darkness to read the numbers on front doors and mailboxes. 186…164…128… Then the houses stopped. Suburban yards with neatly-trimmed trees gave way to a long, flat section of empty, cracked pavement.

The first moment she saw the abandoned warehouses, she knew that she had reached her destination.

They were old concrete buildings, rundown, moss pushing through the cracks in the walls, windows yellow and warped—or missing all together. Emma pulled into the parking lot and killed the engine. The car's headlights stayed on for a minute, cutting through the rain, then faded out.

The dashboard clock stayed lit another minute. Emma watched it change from 4:03 to 4:04, then it, too, faded.

Time to go.

She slid out of the car, pulled her hood over her head, and dashed for the second building on the right.

Thick yellow tape blaring "CAUTION" in bold black letters crisscrossed the door to the building. Emma hesitated only a second before ducking beneath them and shoving at the door. It was heavy and resisted her efforts, but, before she had to start thinking about crawling through one of the broken windows, it creaked open—the sound echoed through the interior of the building in such a way as to make Emma think the warehouse was very large and very empty. She slid herself through the crack and let the door smash shut behind her.

Emma pushed back her hood and leaned against the door. The room was huge and empty, walls and floors made of industrial concrete, not quite smooth and as gray as November sky. Rusted metal wheels on racks, the kind that moved large boxes from place to place in factories, still stood in the middle of the floor. The breeze from a broken window turned a few of the wheels, which squeaked pitifully as they turned. The entire place reeked of dust and mold and neglect.

"Dad?" The word was a whisper—Emma found that she couldn't shout. "Dad, are you here?"

The wind blew harder; the turning wheels rattled. There was no other sound but Emma's shallow breath and the hammering of rain on the roof, both amplified by the open concrete room.

She forced herself to step away from the door. "Dad?" she said again, a little louder.

No answer but the rain.

A few more steps. She was closing the distance to the conveyer belts. "Daddy?"

Something creaked. Something else moaned.

Then, a cough.

Emma whirled around, her heart pounding in her throat. "Dad? Is that you?" she demanded. Her voice was too high and breathy to sound properly unalarmed.

Silence.

She looked to her right, where the sound had come from. Several doors lined that wall—old wooden doors with ornate carvings, strange things to find inside an abandoned warehouse. She took half-a-step toward them and stared. The carvings were vivid and disturbing pictures: vines and leaves woven around leering gargoyle faces; people running from a dragon, some of the nearest ones on fire; trees sprouting from the foreheads of lions and bears. She counted ten doors.

One was open.

There was nothing but blackness beyond the door, but Emma understood, suddenly and intuitively that whatever she was here for was waiting for her on the other side. She wasn't sure what that was, whether it was her father, with a smile and an explanation for all this—_and_ _it had better be a damn good one,_ she thought—or something more sinister.

She hung back for a long moment, her mind crowded with images of what she might find, each one more horrifying than the last. Cops, guns drawn and blazing. Kidnappers, their leering smiles echoing the carving on one of the doors. Dad, lying sprawled, injured—or dead—against a far wall. The last one sharpened her resolve, shot a little courage into her racing heart. If Dad was waiting for her, she had to go. There was no choice.

She straightened and pulled in a few just-barely-too-shallow breaths, then, without giving herself time to second-guess the decision, ran at the opened door.

And through it.

It crashed shut behind her with absolute finality, and she was plunged into darkness.

Emma whirled around and groped in the blackness for the door's handle. Her fingers touched solid wood. Solid wood and nothing else. No lever, no knob, no method of any kind to open the door again. She fumbled around the edges, feeling for the doorframe, for some crack, some shred of light.

There was nothing but wood. Wood and stone.

She beat at the door with her fists, but she knew this was a useless gesture. The warehouse was abandoned, an abandoned building in an abandoned complex. There was no one around to hear her.

She rested her head against the door and struggled to breathe evenly. _At least it can't get any worse,_ she thought. At least this was as bad as it could possibly get—buried in blackness in an abandoned, unfamiliar building, without anyone even knowing she was missing. At least there wasn't a murderer or a kidnapper or Dad's bloodied body here to greet her.

But then something, a cold and knarled hand, grabbed her elbow.

Emma screamed.


	6. Expected

Another shriek echoed hers, surprised rather than terrified. Emma spun around, knocking the hand off her arm. "Who's there? Who are you?" she demanded, her voice shaking.

"Great gladderfish, child, you scared me!" a voice answered.

Emma raised her eyebrows, though she doubted her company would be able to see the expression in the darkness, and curled her hands into fists to control their shaking. "I scared you? You were the one who snuck up behind me!"

A chuckle. "Well, now, that's true. Sorry, didn't mean to frighten you."

"Who are you?"

The voice went on as though the person hadn't even heard her. It was an odd voice, creaky like an unoiled door hinge and so exactly midrange that Emma couldn't decide if it belonged to a man or a woman. "You Outers are so jumpy all the time, it's enough to put any reasonable person on-edge. But that's the job, I suppose. An honorable one, but like to drive me crazy if it keeps up like this for long. Follow me, child."

The ensuing silence made Emma think that the other person might be walking away, but she couldn't see well enough to obey the order—she might as well have her eyes closed for all the good looking around did her. "Um…" she began.

"Oh, that's right." A sigh. "So needy, you Outers, always asking for food and shelter and light. Here, is that better?" There was a faint whir of sound, then a flicker like a struck match, and a light glowed from near Emma's waist, held in the other person's hand and just bright enough to illuminate the surrounding few feet. Emma glanced down at the other person, who stood no taller than her stomach. He—or maybe she?—had a stocky, square body and a deep brown face so wrinkled she couldn't make out any other features save an exceptionally long nose. A puff of thin but dazzlingly white hair glowed like a halo around his—her?—head.

"Who're you?" Emma asked.

The other person smiled, exposing tiny teeth as vividly white as his—Emma was leaning toward "his"—hair. "Nyanyk, Keeper of the Eighth Door, and it's a pleasure, my lady, quite a pleasure, to see you back to the realm."

"What?"

"Never mind, my lady, now's not the time. Well, you hungry?"

Hungry? She was standing in darkness inside an abandoned warehouse, talking to a stranger and worried about her father, and this person, this Nuh-yan-ik, was asking her if she was hungry?

And yet, her stomach rumbled.

The little man—Emma decided the other person was male, though she had no really good reason for making that decision—turned away from her and scurried back into the blackness, leaving his tiny point of light, a small glowing sphere, hovering in the air where he had held it. She reached for it, but, before her fingers could touch it, it moved, circling her head and whining like a mosquito.

Emma flicked her hand at it like she would at an obnoxious fly. It zigzag away from her hand, then returned to circle her head, more insistently, shoving itself into her face, pushing her back a step. She swatted at it again, but it kept coming, driving her back until she was pressed against the door.

"Cut it out, would you?" Emma meant to sound commanding, but her voice squeaked.

"That'll do," Nyanyk said from the darkness, and the light relaxed and settled on hanging demurely a foot above and right of her head.

Emma took one cautious step away from the door, then another when the light matched her movement but did nothing else. "What is that?" she asked as she approached the little man.

Nyanyk shook his head. "A fine thing to keep you all ignorant, how're you supposed to know what to do if you can't tell a spherite from a gladderfish?"

"Um…" Emma answered.

"Never mind now, it's not important." And, before she had a chance to ptotest, to insist that it was important, Nyanyk shoved a plate into her hands. "Now, my lady, when was the last time you had a properly-made oilyshank?"

"Er, never. At least, Mom never made anything that she called 'oilyshank,'" Emma admitted, surprised by the embarrassment that heated up her face.

Nyanyk's wispy white eyebrows shot up. The motion tugged his skin away from his eyes, unburying them from the wrinkles. They were amber-colored and very small. "You, never eaten oilyshank? What did they feed you out there?"

"Oh, you know, chicken and rice and chocolate and such." It was easier if she didn't try to understand, to just take everything as it came without worrying about what it meant and hope explanations would follow.

He shook his head, and the puff of white hair around his face trembled. "Terrible, terrible, to send her out the door and not even feed her right," he mumbled to himself, then, again to Emma: "Well, I've got a table here, and chairs, so you can sit down and have some oilyshank. Everyone says that mine is the best this side of Watamagon."

Emma peered through the gloom, just able to make out the shape of a table and a few chairs several feet away. She sat and looked at the food piled onto the plate. In the dim yellowish light from the ball still floating a foot from her shoulder, oilyshank didn't look particularly appetizing: a mound of wild-rice-shaped grains in a disturbing shade of blue laid under a ball of yellowish—was it meat? It had a meat-like texture and smell, but the way it was shaped, like a ball covered in spikes, was unlike any meat she had ever seen. The sauce that dribbled off the spikes was vivid yellow and turned green when it touched the blue rice-stuff.

Nyanyk hadn't given her a fork or knife. "How am I…?" Emma started, looking up to see the little man scooping large handfuls of the greenish rice-stuff into his mouth with one hand and holding the meatish piece in the other, taking a bit of it with every scoop. Sauce dribbled down his chin.

Disgusting. But it felt rude to not eat, and she was hungry, so Emma screwed up her courage, plucked the spiky ball off the rice with two fingers, and bit into it warily.

It was sweet, juicy, and flavorful, better than any meat she had ever eaten. The sauce was thick and creamy, not cheesy exactly, but similar in taste and texture. Emma ate every grain of the rice-stuff and even cleaned her plate with her finger when she was done. "My mother would die if she ever saw me do that," she said, laughing, as she wiped her saucy hands on her jeans.

Nyanyk shook his head. "It's the only way to eat oilyshank—the oils in your skin when they mix with the sauce are what give it the sweetness. Her Majesty's cooks have to pour skin oil into the sauce before it's served, because they never touch their food upstairs."

"Upstairs?" Emma interrupted, looking around the room again. "So we're in…a castle?"

"Of course, where else do you think something so important as the Eighth Door would be?"

Emma's face warmed, though it was hardly her fault she didn't know where she was or what was going on, but the tone of Nyanyk's voice made it sound like she should have instinctively known and that he was disappointed to learn she wasn't as clever as he hoped. Embarrassment made her snappy. "Well, it's not like you've bothered to explain anything, have you?"

"Explanations are for later, my lady, when all four of you are together, and it'll only have to be told once."

Again, that disappointed and condescending tone. Emma frowned. She did not like being talked down to. And…had he just called her "my lady," again?

He stretched his arms above his head and yawned. "You must be sleepy. I know I am, so how's about we save it for tomorrow and get some rest, all right?"

Emma was tempted to disagree with the suggestion, to cross her arms and insist on some answers—not the least of which about whether or not this strange little man knew anything about her father—but Nyanyk had already turned away from her and ambled off into the darkness. He came back a minute later, but only long enough to thrust a long purple blanket and thin yellowish pillow into her hands. "I've not got a proper bed for you, but this should suffice for the night," he said. "The spherite'll go out when you tell it to." Then, suddenly, he bowed and smiled. "A pleasure, my lady, always a pleasure. Do try to sleep—you'll need your rest." Another bow, another smile, and he wandered out of her sight again.

Emma laid down and stared up at the hovering sphere of light that bobbed gently over her head. The floor was cold and hard, the thin, rough blanket and pillow no protection from the irregular bumps in the stone. She glanced at her watch and saw, with some irritation, that the battery had died at about the same time she had entered the warehouse, and the hands still insisted it was 4:05. It had to be later than that, evening at least, but she couldn't quite guess how late.

Had Mom begun to worry yet?

_I'm grounded for life, for sure,_ she thought.

And when she did eventually sleep, it was to dream of wandering lost through a strange and elegant hallway, an angry wind howling in her ears.


	7. Arrested

**Author's Note: I apologize for the extreme lateness of this update. This chapter spun wildly out of control as I was revising it and required a complete rewrite. I can only hope it was worth the wait!**

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Emma woke to the distant clatter of metal on metal. Dad must be making omelets. Her mouth watered at the thought. She needed something homey like an omelet to chase away that bizarre dream she just had, where Dad was missing, and a strange note had led her through a strange door in an abandoned warehouse. She could almost hear Dad laughing when she told him about the dwarf who had scared the wits out of her when she had gone through the door. Mom would probably bring up Freud and unconscious wish fulfillment and how doors and darkness symbolized teenage sexual desire. Or something.

Either way, it would make for a fun story over Sunday morning omelets.

The clattering got louder, closer, and a voice, a deep, unfamiliar male voice, spoke. "Her Majesty's orders, dwarf. Now, what are you hiding from her?"

"I'm hiding nothing, nothing!" This was a different voice—a strange, creaky voice that Emma half-recognized as being from her dream, though it was different from how she remembered it. It had been friendly before, almost amused; now, it fast and rough. Afraid. "You've looked around, you've searched my closet and cabinet, and you've seen nothing."

"And what's this?"

The deep voice was practically on top of her now. Emma held very still, willing herself into invisibility.

"She's no one, just an Outer girl who got lost and asked to stay 'til she could get back through the Door. You know how those Outers are, always snooping around where they shouldn't be."

"Shut up, dwarf." A boot touched her side, not brutally, but with a certain kind of firmness that told her she hadn't been able to make herself invisible. "You, Outer. Wake up."

Emma squeezed her eyes tight. _Wake up,_ she begged herself. _Dad's making omelets, and yours will get cold if you don't eat it._

The boot tickled her ribs again. Emma twitched away and looked up at the man standing over her. He was huge, at least a full head taller than any man she had ever seen and twice as broad. His entire body was covered in some kind of armor that glittered like no metal she had ever seen in the dim light from two of those hovering spheres. A massive sword, drawn but mostly relaxed, rested near her head. She flinched.

But what was really weird was that, at the same moment she twitched away from the sword, this powerful armored man who certainly should have no reason to fear anyone, least of all an unarmed teenaged girl, flinched away from her.

For half-a-second, the entire room fell deathly silent—the sound of Nyanyk struggling hopelessly with another armored man cut off, and the man looking at her blinked, his lips turning white. For half-a-second, Emma couldn't guess at what had startled him. Then she could. She didn't have a clear memory of removing her contacts before falling asleep, but it had been a habit since she was seven years old, and she could guess what he was staring at.

Her eyes. Her creepy colorless eyes.

After that half-a-second, Nyanyk resumed struggling, and the man standing over Emma turned back to him. He took three long strides toward the little man—almost far enough away to leave the circle of light created by the nearest hovering sphere—and struck him with the back of one armor-plated hand. Nyanyk crumpled nearly to the floor, held up only by the restraining arms of the other guard. "No one, you say? She's no one, is she?" he shouted. "Her Majesty will hear of _this_, you can count on that!" He struck Nyanyk again.

Emma leapt to her feet. That hollow place in her chest burned, and a breeze tickled the hairs around her ears, brushed along the skin of her neck. She wanted to create a real windstorm and throw the armored men onto their backs, but that reminded her of what she had done at Sophie Turner's eighth birthday party, and the thought stopped cold even that tiny breeze. Still, she couldn't do nothing, so she shouted at him. "Stop it! He hasn't done anything wrong!"

The guard turned on her with an expression so ferocious that Emma shrank away until she felt a wall at her back. He strode toward her and grabbed her arm in one hand, tight enough to hurt, but she didn't miss the way his eyes flickered as he touched her, darting toward his companion as though seeking reassurance.

The other guard nodded. "All right, come quiet and no one has to get hurt," he said. His voice was less angry-sounding than the other's. He nudged Nyanyk forward, and the man holding Emma tugged her after them. She looked at him again. She knew how to throw a decent punch, of course—Dad was all about her being able to defend herself and had taught her years ago both how and where to punch so it hurt—but this guard was so armored that she didn't think punching him would do anything but break her knuckles.

The pace he set had Emma struggling to keep up—her knees were always hovering on the verge of collapse as they moved, but she didn't dare let the guards know that. She felt strange, outside of herself somehow, her head not quite connected to her body. The fear racing through her limbs was oddly fuzzy, like she was just dreaming it.

_Wake up, wake up, please._

The guards hauled them through the darkness toward a steep flight of stairs lit from above, up the stairs, and into a huge hallway flanked on the left by doors and on the right by enormous windows. Sunlight glared through the windows, and Emma blinked, blinded. They continued down the hall, past door after door, until finally the guards stopped in front of one. It was plain wood, unmarked save for stick-figure pictures scratched into it like an afterthought but placed so carefully that they seemed to mean something, like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Emma stared at them, desperately, as if the way to escape these guards was in the tiny stick dog—or maybe it was a horse, it was kinda hard to tell. There was no handle or knob that she could see.

Nyanyk was struggling again. "This won't do any good," he said, his voice still raw. "If you think she'll pat you on the head and leave you alone for this, you're wrong."

The guard holding Emma laughed. "Stupid little man, she _sent_ us for you." Then he placed his palm on the center of the door and dropped to one knee, yanking at Emma's arm, but Emma remained stubbornly standing. "Your Majesty," he said, as if speaking to the queen herself, "your humble servant requests entrance."

And, after the briefest of pauses, the door dissolved. Dissolved, like salt in water, until there was nothing left but air where the guard's hand now rested.

The guard stood again and hauled Emma forward, his companion and Nyanyk on their heels. Emma glanced back, trying to catch Nyanyk's eye, as if he might somehow be able to answer her questions, and saw in her periphery the door reform itself.

She was beginning to think it a waste of time and energy to be amazed every time something bizarre happened here.

Her attention was drawn toward the room they had entered. But if every other the room in her life had been called a room, then this place couldn't be given such a common name. It was a hall—a grand hall, Emma guessed, a palace. A magnificent ceiling arched a hundred feet over her head, painted like she always imagined the Sistine Chapel to be. Marble pillars flanked the red carpet they were walking down, which slashed across the blue-and-white tile floors like a huge, bloody injury. People—a few with fangs or horns or hooves, but mostly human-looking people—dressed in long gowns and top hats stared at them as they walked down the carpet; Emma, still wearing the jeans and zip-up hoodie she had tossed on the morning before, suddenly felt underdressed. Everyone was staring at them, the noise in the hall dying and then picking up again, this time in a subdued mutter that swept through the crowd as the guards, Emma, and Nyanyk did. Their muttering pricked at something half-forgotten in Emma's heart. Pride. She straightened as much as she could in the guard's grip and lifted her head.

Whatever was coming, whatever horror she was about to endure, she would take it with her head high. She would not let these people—not the guards, not the crowd, not the mysterious Her Majesty that she had no doubt they were on their way to face—see her afraid.

Their long walk across the hall ended at a small flight of stairs that raised a dais with four golden thrones nearly twenty feet above the rest of the hall. At the base of the steps, the guards stopped and bowed, Emma's falling to both knees, Nyanyk's dipping so low that his nose touched the ground. Emma stiffened and forced herself to look at the two occupied thrones on the dais. One was a woman, a slender, elegant woman in long purple robes, with knife-sharp eyes that missed nothing, not the broken zipper on Emma's hoodie or the coffee stain on her jeans. This was the queen, Her Majesty; Emma knew it without having to be told. The other person was male, younger than the queen but just as elegant, and the pointed, handsome features of their faces were so alike that Emma had no doubt they were mother and son.

"What news, Tryl, Borgyn?" the queen asked, her dark eyes sweeping across Emma and Nyanyk and probably picking the answers out of their brains before anyone answered aloud.

"It is as you thought, Your Majesty," Nyanyk's guard said without lifting his head. "The rebels are amassing an army."

The queen lifted one eyebrow. "Indeed. An army of servants and dwarfs and teenagers who don't even know what they are. Well." She looked at Emma again, straight in the eyes, and smiled. "We'll have to thank the rebels for providing us with the set."


	8. Questioned

**Author's Note: After a long hiatus, this story has re-emerged with new energy and direction! My thanks and apologies to everyone who may have been waiting.**

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The queen stood and held up one hand, palm out, and the guard holding Emma's arm let go. Pinpricks of pain shot down her arm as feeling returned to her hand. Emma spun on her heel and rushed for the door.

"Stop!"

The word rang above the muttering in the crowd, above the dim sound of Nyanyk struggling once again for freedom, even above the rush of panic that had Emma's heart throbbing in her ears. Emma froze midstep. Her mind urged her away from the dais, to the dissolving door, down the steps and out into her own world again, but her feet would not listen.

"Come here!"

Again, that implacable power. Emma's feet turned her around and retraced the half-dozen steps she had managed to escape, then more, bringing her up the dais steps until she was only three below the thrones. Tears were pressing against her eyes, but she forced them back. A breeze followed her, too soft to do more than nudge the flyaway strands of her hair.

The queen hadn't moved an inch since signaling the guard to let Emma go: her hand was still up, her palm facing the crowd, now as though to quiet them. She glanced down at Emma—even if they had been standing on an equal plane, the queen would be at least head and shoulders taller—and smiled. "I apologize, my lady, that was rude of me, but I couldn't allow you to run off. I do hope you understand."

"Understand," Emma repeated, her voice a squeak.

"If you will permit me, Lady—I apologize again, I do not know your name."

The queen paused, waiting; Emma thought about running again and knew that it would do no good. "Emma Green," she said slowly.

"Lady Emmagreen." She pronounced it as one word, one name. "I mean you no harm. Do you believe me?"

She didn't, but she didn't dare say so. "Yes, Your Majesty."

The queen smiled with what seemed to be real relief. "Good." She stepped back an inch and held her arm out toward the thrones like she was gesturing at them. "Come. Sit with me."

"I'd rather—"

"Sit down," she ordered, and Emma practically fell into the nearest throne.

"That's better. Now, my dear, would you mind answering a few questions for me?"

Nyanyk struggled again with his guard, but the guard just frowned and held him a little tighter.

"What are you doing here?"

Emma scanned the hall, but no one would meet her eyes.

"Answer me, and tell the truth. What are you doing here?"

"I-I don't know." The words were wrenched from her mouth and threatened to pull a sob along with them. "My father's been missing for two weeks, and then there was a note—" She slapped a hand over her mouth to keep back the strange croaking sound she could feel clawing at the inside of her throat.

The young man, who until this moment had done nothing but watch, stood suddenly. "You demand too much of her too soon, Mother," he said, laying a hand on the queen's forearm and confirming what Emma had already guessed about the relationship between the two of them. "She is confused and frightened, and you are not helping matters by interrogating her like you would a traitor." He turned to face Emma and smiled warmly. "Forgive my mother, Lady Emmagreen. She often forgets how difficult it is to come in from the Outer Realm after a long absence."

He was very handsome—tall as his mother, broad and straight and elegant, with thick black hair and focused blue eyes and a face like Emma thought only existed in fairy tales. The handsome prince. And his smile was glorious. Emma's muscles relaxed, and she dropped her hand from over her mouth. "It's okay," she said. "And…it's just Emma."

The prince bowed his head. "My apologies, Lady Emma."

Emma shook her head. "It's okay," she said again.

"So what do you recommend, Lyen?" the queen asked in an undertone, like she didn't want to be overheard.

"I recommend she be shown to a room and given a chance to bathe and change and then be welcomed with honor," he said, making no attempt to lower his voice like the queen had.

Emma toyed with the broken zipper on her hoodie—she didn't want to imagine the state her hair was in—and flushed.

The queen nodded, then looked at Emma and smiled. "Forgive me, Lady Emma, I do not know where my manners have run off to. Of course you will be shown a room. Hywatha!"

Hywatha stepped out from behind the thrones. She was a truly gorgeous girl, about Emma's height and very thin, with pale, almost silver, skin covered in a profusion of silver and blue tattoos swirling around her eyes and up her arms. From her shoulders sprouted a pair of iridescent green dragonfly wings.

She curtsied to the queen. "Yes, Your Majesty?" Her voice was soft and musical, a little deeper than Emma would have expected coming from such a delicate-looking girl, but perfect just the same.

Emma realized her mouth was opened, and she closed it, so hard that her teeth smashed together. Dwarves and fairies and princes? What kind of place _was_ this?

"Take Lady Emma to a room and see that she is garbed"—the queen's eyes flashed over Emma's dirty jeans—"_appropriately_."

Hywatha curtsied again. "Yes, Your Majesty." She then looked at Emma and smiled. "This way, my lady."

Emma stood and followed the girl's fluttering wings from the dais and toward a side door away from the red carpet she'd come down. She glanced back toward the hall as she left.

The less-angry armored guard was still holding Nyanyk by the arms. The other guard drew his sword and, with a word from the queen, pierced the little man's chest clean through. Nyanyk's body slumped to the floor.

The queen turned away from the body, toward her son. "Lyen, we will need a new Keeper immediately," she said. "Find someone..." She faded off, looked out across the hall. "...Someone trustworthy."

The prince nodded. "Yes, Mother."

Then Hywatha grabbed her arm and jerked the door shut, blocking the hall from sight.


	9. Welcomed

Hywatha hurried her down a long hallway that Emma didn't see. Her stomach tossed like a leaf in a windstorm, and she wondered if she might be sick. She hadn't known Nyanyk for more than a day—they hadn't even really talked beyond discussing last night's oilyshank. They weren't friends—they were barely even acquaintances. So how could she feel so…so _responsible_ for him, for that sword entering his chest?

She staggered to the nearest wall and braced her arms against it, head bent, eyes closed, focusing on breathing evenly and swallowing the hot saliva that filled her mouth.

Hywatha touched her shoulder. "My lady? Are you well?"

Emma shook her head.

"Just listen to the sound of my voice. You'll be all right."

She scrunched her eyes tighter and concentrated on Hywatha's words, and, after a moment, she did feel a little better. At least, she didn't feel like she was about to throw up.

Her legs were giving out; she flipped around and sank to the floor, her back against the wall, her eyes fixed up at the ceiling.

Hywatha dropped to her knees in front of her. "The dwarf was a friend of yours?"

"No. But…they just…killed him."

"Yes."

"They just…no warning, no trial, no nothing, they just…killed him! What _is_ this place?"

Hywatha tilted her head to one side. "You don't know?"

"Of course I don't!" All her fear and anxiety turned the words into a shriek. "Of course I don't know, no one's bothered to tell me what's going on!"

Hywatha frowned. "Then why are you here?"

Emma was crying in earnest now, her words broken up by sobs. "Because my father's been missing for two weeks, and on Thursday I got a note that told me to go to that empty warehouse, but there was nothing there except that door, and I just want my daddy back!" She dropped her head into her arms and knotted her fingers in her hair, pulling until it hurt and then harder until she felt a few strands yank free of her scalp. Wind gusted by her ear.

A short moment, then Hywatha wrapped her arms around Emma's shoulders and leaned her cheek into Emma's flyaway hair. "I'm so sorry, my lady. None of us ever thought you wouldn't already know. Come on now, I'll take you to a room, and you'll feel better once you've bathed and dressed." She stood and helped Emma to her feet and led her down the hallway again with one arm still looped over her shoulders.

The room Hywatha took her to was gorgeous, with huge windows that overlooked a colorful flower garden, and two well-stuffed upholstered chairs pulled up to the marble fireplace. Beyond the doorless arch in the center of the far wall was an enormous bed covered in cream-colored blankets and piled with thick pillows. Emma stood in the doorway and couldn't force herself any further in.

_You're dreaming, wake up, you're dreaming, wake up…_

Hywatha took Emma's hands and gently towed her into the room, through a little door on the side wall, and into a small marble bathroom. "You have hot water in here," she said—was that a touch of envy in her tone?—as she began to draw Emma a bath.

Emma let Hywatha strip her of her clothes and guide her into the hot bath. She sighed, long and deep, and closed her eyes, and she must've fallen asleep for a few minutes, because when Hywatha came in and announced, "I've brought you some clean clothes, my lady," it startled her awake.

"Clothes?" Emma repeated, eyeing what Hywatha brought. To her, clothes were like what she'd taken off: jeans, sneakers, T-shirts, hoodies. What Hywatha was carrying was not clothes, not even the sort of elegant purple robes the queen had been wearing, or a skirt-and-shirt combo like Hywatha's.

It was a ball gown.

And not even like the silk gown Emma had worn to homecoming, which was slim and curvy and modern: it was a full-out tale-as-old-as-time ball gown, complete with flounces and frills and several voluminous petticoats.

It took a long time to get the dress on; it had pieces and layers and required a strange bra-camisole-pantaloon thing that wasn't entirely unlike the onesie pajamas Emma liked as a little girl—though no corset, thankfully; it seemed that this world, whatever it was, never did corsets, and Hywatha frowned and shook her head when Emma asked her if she knew what a corset was.

"There's to be a formal dinner in your honor tonight, and it'll be the first time the Four have been together in nearly seventeen years," Hywatha said at one point when Emma wondered why she couldn't just wear her jeans and T-shirt.

"The…what?" Emma asked, certain she misheard.

"The Four," Hywatha repeated.

"The four what?"

She tugged at a stubborn button on the back of the dress. "There's no 'what,' my lady. It's just…the Four."

"How do you know my father's bedtime stories?"

"My lady?"

Emma pulled away from Hywatha's hands and turned to face her. "My father made up this story, like, ten years ago, just after I started noticing what a freak I was." She smiled painfully and cleared her throat. "This story about these four kids who controlled the elemental forces of nature, wind and fire and earth and water. He called them the Four, and they had all kinds of adventures, trying to defeat this evil queen who…who had taken over and…Hywatha?"

Hywatha had stepped back and was staring at her with eyes so wide Emma was afraid they might fall right out of her head.

"So, you know. It's weird, you referencing my dad's made-up bedtime tales."

Hywatha's expression didn't change.

"Stop looking at me like that."

She blinked and lowered her eyes. "I'm sorry, my lady."

"Why is everyone calling me that? Even the queen—"

"She'll be expecting you."

She heaved a breath and followed Hywatha out of the room and back into the hallway.

Emma knew getting to the room, bathing, and dressing had taken a while, but it still surprised her how quickly the throne room had changed in that time, from the receiving hall it had been that morning to the banquet hall it was now—the carpet rolled up, the people cleared out, and a dozen long tables set with chairs instead filling the space. The tables were loaded with food, all unfamiliar shapes and unnerving colors like Nyanyk's oilyshank had been—Emma's eyes flashed toward the bottom of the dais steps, but there wasn't so much as a bloodstain to mark where the guard had killed him.

The queen and prince sat at the table closest to the dais. They both stood when Emma entered the room; the prince bowed and offered her a hand, palm up, as though he expected her to take it and hold it.

She balled her fingers into fists and crossed her arms over her chest, but he just smiled and let his hand fall back to his side without even a flush of embarrassment. "Lady Emma," he began, "may I present to you Lady Bethany and Lords Joshua and Brian." He gestured to three people sitting at the table, Lady Bethany and Lord Joshua on the queen's right side and Lord Brian on his left. There was an empty seat between the prince and Lord Brian, which the prince pulled out and bowed Emma into.

Emma could feel the pressure of a hundred eyes on her, and she ducked her head and kept her own on the tabletop. The queen was saying something now, but she wasn't paying attention.

Lord Brian turned to her and held out his right hand. "I'm Brian Macabee," he whispered.

Emma blinked at his hand. Everyone for the past two days had been bowing and curtsying to her, calling her "my lady," making as though they wanted to kiss her fingers, and she was amazed to see that this man—no, not a man; he wasn't any older than she was—this kid was offering his hand like a normal person, expecting her to shake it. "Emma Green," she whispered back and shook his hand.

She noticed him flinch when their eyes met, but, before she could even look away, he smiled. He was nerdy-looking, thin and gangly, with muddy-black hair and thick black-rimmed glasses. Behind them, his eyes were pitch-black, as though the pupils had swallowed up the irises—almost the exact opposite of hers, and nearly as disturbing.

"Lady Emma." The prince's voice, low and almost in her ear, pulled her attention to him. "I don't believe I've yet properly introduced myself. I am Lyen, son of Queen Jianya."

"Lee-in," Emma repeated slowly, trying to get it right.

He smiled, and the rhythm of her heart faltered a moment.

"My lords and ladies," the queen said, turning her head to the left and right and gathering all attention with one quick look, "I welcome you to Castle Iyer. If you need any little thing, I implore you to merely ask, and it will be seen to. Now, I've kept you too long from your meal. Please eat." She sat back down and dug into the food set before her.

Emma ate as ordered, but she didn't notice the food, or even whether or not she liked it; exhaustion leaked through her veins, making her head buzz, and she found herself thinking about that thick mattress crowded with pillows and longing for it as the banquet dragged on and on and no one seemed to care anymore if she was there.

"When do we get to leave?" she whispered. She was speaking to Brian, because, of all the people she'd seen in this…wherever she was…he appeared to be the most normal, but Prince Lyen heard her and answered.

"Are you finished?"

"I'm tired." She tried to keep the note of complaint out of her tone.

He was on his feet immediately, as though the words were electric shocks, and called for a servant to "escort Lady Emma to her rooms." "Sleep well," he said to her with another pulse-altering smile before she left.

She shed the gown and petticoats as quickly as possible once in the bedroom, popping a few buttons in the process, laid on the bed in that weird onesie undergarment, and was very nearly asleep when a timid knock startled her awake.

She groaned and rolled over, but the knock came again, more firmly, and that firmness said whoever was knocking wouldn't leave her alone until they'd seen her, so she got up and opened the door.

It was dark, the only light from a torch halfway down the long hallway, and it took a moment for Emma to make out the shape in front of her. Then, when she did, her jaw popped open, and she staggered back a step as though the person had shoved her.

"Dad?"


	10. Surprised

"Dad?" Emma said again. Her voice shook.

He smiled a wide, toothy smile, the kind he'd always given her when he got home from work. "Hey, kiddo."

She rubbed her eyes with the fleshy part of her palms, clearing the sleepiness that made her vision blur, but, when she dropped her hands, Dad was still there, his smile beginning to morph from happy to nervous. "Daddy? Is it really you?"

He held out his arms. "It really is, Emmy."

It was the nickname that did it, that convinced her he was her father, and she threw herself into his arms. The weeks of worry, the strangeness of the day, the confusion of this place—it all crashed against her then, and she broke down into sobs violent enough to shake her apart.

Dad rocked her gently back and forth. "It's all right, Emmy, I'm here, I've got you," he whispered.

"Daddy, Daddy," she whimpered back, sounding to herself like a little girl but not caring.

"Shh, shh, it's okay, it's all right."

Her tears slowed after a minute, like a violent thunderstorm that quickly blows itself out, but she didn't move. Her father's arms were safe and familiar.

He was the first to pull back—a little bit, to hold her by the shoulders at arm's-length and look her over. If he thought it odd that she was sleeping in nothing but a onesie undergarment, he didn't show it. "You got my message, then?" he said, casually, as though he'd asked her to get some milk on her way home from school.

Emma's face heated up. "Got your…? Dad, what's going on? Mom and I have been out of our minds for _two weeks_, and the police think you could be dead—they told Mom they thought you were dead, and you send me this weird-ass note to get me through this weird-ass door, and this weird-ass woman, she murders a dwarf—a _dwarf_, Dad!—right there in front of everyone, and you'd better have a _damn good_ explanation for all this." She fell quiet, breathing hard, her stomach quivering.

"She killed him?"

"What?"

"Nyanyk. There've been rumors all day, but we hoped…. She actually killed him?"

"Well, it was the guard who did it, but, yeah. Dad, please," and she couldn't keep the begging out of her voice, "what's going on?"

He was quiet a moment, and Emma could feel his eyes on her, a calculating weight on the top of her head. When he answered, his voice was low. "I can explain everything," he said, "but not here."

Emma crossed her arms. "Why not here?"

"Because, Emmy, you're not the only one owed an explanation. Get some clothes on, and we'll go someplace safer."

* * *

Three minutes later and dressed back in her jeans and hoodie, Emma followed her father through the dark hallways of the castle. They moved fast, occasionally breaking into a jog, their path branching into narrow side halls and down rickety stairs so often that Emma hoped she wouldn't be expected to find her way back by herself. But Dad seemed to have a destination in mind and seemed to know how to get to it, so she followed him without complaining.

They stopped outside of another door, plain wood, its deliberate nondescriptness the only thing notable about it.

They were deep in the bowels of the castle by then, deeper than the door to the warehouse had been by at least three or four steep staircases. The air was damp and stale, and it pressed on Emma's chest like a ton of bricks.

Dad knocked on the door in a particular pattern, a code, and, a moment later, a voice hissed through the wood. "Great power?"

"Great responsibility," Dad whispered back, then smiled at Emma's frown. "They're the words emblazoned on the crest."

"Oh," Emma said. She was sure she'd heard those words before—wasn't that the theme of one of those blockbuster superhero movies?—or maybe she'd seen them on the Middle-Age seal that had held her note closed.

The door opened on well-oiled hinges to reveal a man who looked human, save for two small horns protruding from his hair and goat hooves peeking out beneath his pant cuffs. He nodded at Dad, then glanced at Emma. His eyes widened.

Emma started to look away—she'd forgotten until this moment that she'd left her contacts…somewhere, probably near that first door—but the goat-foot man beat her to it, blinking and lifting one fist to his heart and bowing almost as deep as the guards had bowed to the queen. "My lady Wind," he said, making the word "wind" sound capitalized.

Emma glanced at Dad, who smiled his peculiar just-told-a-joke smile, laid a hand on her shoulder, and urged her into the room in front of him.

It was a small room, as nondescript as the door promised it would be, lit by two torches in the far corners that filled the room with more smoke than light. A dozen or so people stood in the room, talking in low whispers that died when Emma and Dad came in. She stepped toward him, half-hiding behind him the way she had her first day of school; he looped an arm around her shoulders and squeezed gently. She saw Hywatha in the back of the room, and the three people the prince had introduced her to at the banquet stood in their own almost-huddle at the left wall—they weren't looking at each other or even facing in the same direction, but they were clearly apart from the rest of the group, like a line had been drawn around them and neither side dared cross it. Brian and the other girl—was her name Brittney?—noticed Emma and smiled, but the other boy just crossed his arms and scowled down at the floor.

The goat-foot man had closed the door and come up on Dad's other side, and silence oozed through the room, thick as molasses. One of the men, apparently human, who'd been standing near Hywatha in the back of the room, pushed his way forward, then stood staring in front of Emma.

He was a stooped-shouldered man, maybe ten years Dad's senior, with steel-gray hair that fell just longer than his ears and a face wrinkled like a balled-up piece of paper. Not an unnatural amount like Nyanyk's had been, but it still gave him the appearance of being wind-whipped and tired. He reached out a hand and touched Emma's cheek. "Emmelynda," he whispered.

Emma flinched away. The man didn't appear to mean her any harm, but he was a stranger, and she didn't want a stranger, no matter how harmless, touching her.

He dropped his hand, but the expression that flickered across his face made her think that the gesture took some effort, and the fact that she'd twitched away stung him like an ant bite. "I'm sorry, I should've known…you don't remember me. Of course you don't. The last time I saw you, I could still…" He held out his hands, palms up, and stared down at them with a smile made up of equal parts fondness and exhaustion. "…Still pick you up with my hands…" His voice cracked, and he blinked several times as though chasing away tears.

In a day full of strangeness, this was the strangest thing yet. Emma stepped away, out from under Dad's arm, toward the door. "All right," she said flatly, and the firmness in her voice encouraged her. "I've had all the weirdness I can stand. Does someone care to tell me what is going on?"

"It's hard to know where to begin," Dad said.

"How about at the beginning."

He smiled. "It's hard to know where the beginning is."

"Well, then, start with what you're doing here, and where you've been the past two weeks." Emma had never heard her voice do that, take that kind of tone, especially not with her father, and her stomach turned over once in disgust, but she didn't take it back.

Dad's face turned pink at the edges. "That's a long story."

Emma crossed her arms. A few hairs fluttered into her eyes.

"Okay, okay. Um…" He sucked at his top lip like he did when staring at a broken engine he was trying to fix, then suddenly turned toward the other three kids in the room.

"Dad."

"Just a minute, Emma, I'll get to it." He waved the other kids forward. "C'mere."

Brian and the girl glanced at each other, then took a few steps toward them. The other boy didn't move, didn't even look up.

"What do you know?"

The girl shook her head. "Not a thing. I was chasing my cat."

"Lord Brian?"

"Well…" Brian exhaled gustily. "The queen's a dictator, and I take it you all are looking to see her overthrown."

"A rebel army," Emma broke in. "Of servants and dwarves and teenagers who don't know what they are. The queen said that this morning. She's a bad woman, I got that. What I don't understand is what any of this has to do with anything, with you, or me, or Mom…Mom must be completely insane with worry by now!"

Something in Dad's posture changed, a slump of shoulder or a droop of head, and, when he looked back at Emma, she had the horrible feeling that he was as much a stranger as the man who'd touched her cheek.

"Daddy?" she whispered.

His voice was heavy as a wheelbarrow of bricks. "Do you remember those stories I told you when you were little, the ones about the Four?"

"Yeah, the kids, the ones who had power over nature. I was telling Hywatha about them just a few hours ago."

"They…are…true, at least the premise of them. There are people who can…"

"I know. I do the, the thing with the wind."

"But those people are…" He hesitated, looked up at the ceiling a moment, then back at Emma. He took her hands and squeezed them. "In this world, those people are more than just people. They are…royalty. No, that's the wrong word. Parliament. Um, a kind of…government? It's called _hehyt_, and there's no good translation for it."

"How do you…?" The rest of the question couldn't make it through the tightness in her throat.

"Know these things?" he finished with something that resembled a smile.

She nodded.

He squeezed her hands again, sucked in a breath, and spoke quickly now, his words tripping over themselves on their way out. "I'm from here. Originally. Born and raised in the town about a mile from here, and I went out through the Door not long after Jianya took power. I meant to come back, I guess, but then I met Karen, and she…" He shook his head. "They brought you to us about a year later, when it became clear who you are."

Emma's sleep-deprived brain chewed on the words without making any sense of them—because the patterns they were making were impossible. "Dad, I'm seventeen years old. You don't have to hold to some story about me being dropped on your doorstep by a stork."

"It wasn't a stork. It was Nyanyk. And…your parents."


	11. Hurt

Emma blinked. It didn't add up. Nyanyk? And her parents? The only way what Dad said would make sense was if…if he and Mom weren't her parents. But that was ridiculous. Of course they were her parents. Mom talked about the day she was born, the huge wind that had knocked out the electricity for half the town, every year on her birthday. "You laughed," she'd say, "and it went dead calm, like someone had turned it off."

How would Mom know that if she weren't Emma's mother? She wouldn't.

Everyone was looking at her, waiting for a reaction, Dad and the older man with tension pulling at their shoulders and lips. Hair was tickling her face again, blowing around into her eyes; she flicked her head to knock the hair away. "I don't understand," she said slowly, though she thought that maybe, horribly, she was beginning to.

Dad glanced back at the other man, who took two steps forward and placed himself next to Dad. "Emmelynda," he said, as though it was her name, and touched her cheek again. "Jianya was going to have you killed, you and the others. You all were still babies, and the previous Four were growing old, and she took advantage of that and seized control. She'd always had a…a _way_ with words, and, without the Four, she knew she'd have no trouble taking over. We had to hide you, all four of you, and we knew some of our number had found lives in the outer realm"—his eyes flickered to Dad and back—"so we brought you through the Door to them. We would've stayed, but…you've been in the queen's presence. You know that it's…difficult…to disobey her."

"We?" Emma repeated. Her voice was weak, almost inaudible.

"Your mother and me. And…" He looked at the other three kids. "Your parents as well, though they didn't have the queen forbidding them to leave the castle as Betrys and I did." He turned back to Emma and didn't say anything else, just watched her, his expression nearly afraid.

Emma stepped back, pulling her hands out of Dad's, and stood almost against the door. Her vision blurred. "You lied to me," she said, surprised that the words sounded so calm in her mouth—they were whirling through her head like furniture caught in a tornado, crashing, sharp-edged and heavy, against her skull.

Dad—or whoever he was—bowed his head but didn't answer.

"You and Mom, my whole life, it's all been a lie."

"No. Not all of it."

"No?" Emma repeated, her voice belligerent.

"Emma, I changed your dirty diapers and helped you with your homework and taught you how to drive. You've always been my daughter, and I couldn't love you any more if you were my own flesh and blood."

He made a motion as though to hug her, but she jerked back until the closed door prevented any further retreat. "Don't. Touch. Me," she hissed, sucking in a stiff breath between each word. The breeze that had been tickling her hair was building, spreading, ruffling sleeves and hems all the way across the room. Every cell in her body ached.

"Emma," he said with a warning in his voice.

She didn't care. How could she? Everything she'd ever known, about herself, her life, her family—none of it was true. The wind was strong enough to push now, to shove at people's shoulders and make them teeter on their toes and hooves and whatever-other kind of feet like wobbly bowling pins. Someone screamed.

"All right, enough."

The voice didn't belong to either of the men who'd claimed to be her father, and the sudden sound through the howling of the wind distracted her. It was one of the other kids, Brian, who planted himself directly in front of her when she noticed him. For all that he was a skinny, gangly boy, he held himself like a rock, legs apart, arms down, shoulders back, a posture that spoke of an unruffleable temper. Even the wind didn't seem to be bothering him. He held Emma's gaze without flinching until, finally, she heaved a sigh, and the wind died to nothing more than a tickling breeze again, leaving everyone tousled and scared but uninjured and still on their feet.

"That's better," Brian said. "Thanks."

Emma shrugged.

He turned back to the rest of the room but stayed standing in front of her in a posture that was almost protective—protecting them from her, she realized. He needn't have bothered; with the death of the wind came the death of her energy, and she stared silently at Dad—at the man she'd always thought was her dad. He looked back at her, his familiar face so drawn with guilt and sadness that she could barely recognize it. She was reminded of the last time she'd seen him before he disappeared, standing in the kitchen with misty eyes and saying he loved her like he was saying goodbye.

What had she said in return? She couldn't remember.

There were other words being spoken in the room, the goat-foot man taking the role of storyteller and telling them more about where they were and what was happening, but Emma only heard snatches: "…Powerful, but not undefeatable…strong magic…reestablish _hehyt_…peace for the realm…"

She wanted to leave, to get out of this place with its maze of hallways and doorways, its fantasy-creature populace, and its talk of queens and magic. To rewind her life back to the moment she'd sat looking through the rain at Three Squares—had it really been only yesterday?—and go in to work. Or, better, to rewind to the moment Dad had said he'd get them their rice and insist that Mom go instead, so long as she was allowed to forget that she didn't really belong in that house, at least not the way she thought she did.

She wanted to go home…but it couldn't be home anymore, not now, not when she knew that it had been a lie. Where was left? Chicago, where her grandmother lived? No—because Nana was her grandmother the way Mom was her mother, and she didn't know Emma half the time anyway. Was there nowhere left for her, then? No place she could call home? The idea made her head hurt, her throat and eyes sting, and she was afraid that she might start crying.

_No,_ she scolded herself. _Not here. Not in front of all these people._ The goat-foot man was still talking, still explaining, but she'd had all the explanation she could handle, understood more than she knew what to do with, and she had to get someplace private before she broke apart with all that knowledge.

She turned and wrenched open the door. The goat-foot man stopped talking, and she could feel all the eyes in the room boring into her skull.

"Emma?"

She wasn't sure whose voice it was. She didn't care. "Please, don't," she said without turning, her hands wedging themselves into her blowing-around hair and pressing against her temples as though she were trying to hold her head together. "It's too much, too fast. I have to…" Her words faded, and she dashed out the door. No one tried to stop her.


	12. Comforted

**Author's Note: I have lots of excuses as to why it's been several months since I've uploaded a new chapter of this story. Unfortunately, each excuse is worse than the previous, and the first one's pretty pathetic to begin with, so I'll just say a sincere "I'm sorry," and let's move on, shall we?**

* * *

Emma ran up stairs and down hallways. She knew she'd never be able to find her way back to the bedroom even if she still had her wits about her, but just the feeling of her legs taking her _somewhere_ made her feel more in control—of her own mobility, at least.

Eventually, panting from running hard up a particularly-steep staircase she was sure she'd never gone down, she stopped and sank to the floor against a wall. The hallway she was in was very large and open with a dozen enormous windows on one side and a long row of doors on the other, all closed. Everything was dark; even the torches that hung between the doors were extinguished, and the windows let in no more light than the faint glimmer of stars.

Emma was exhausted, lost—and alone.

It sank in then, what that meant. She was alone. Her father, the one person in the world she always trusted absolutely and unquestioningly, was not her father.

And the rest of what he'd said, about how he'd always considered her his daughter and couldn't love her any more if she actually were—that didn't even matter now. Because this lie was so huge that she couldn't believe he really did love her.

Emma's forehead fell against her knees, and, when the tears came, they came hot and fast and so hard that her stomach ached.

"Lady Emma? Are you all right?"

The voice came from behind her, and she noticed a light stretching suddenly out toward the far wall like a door had just been opened. There was a long thin shadow in that light, and then the prince, bundled up in a thick green bathrobe, crouched down beside her.

Great. As if things weren't bad enough, she'd gone and broke down in the one hallway in this entire palace of hallways that was outside the prince's bedroom door.

Emma smeared the tears off her cheeks with the backs of her hands. "Yeah," she said quickly. "I'm fine."

The prince smiled, but she could see that he didn't believe her. She looked away, down at the coffee stain on her jeans.

Silence stretched between them like a rubber band about to snap. She could feel him looking at her, but she kept her eyes carefully on the stain. She would not look at him. He could not make her.

"If I may ask…" He started to speak, then hesitated.

Emma didn't look up. "What?"

"You seem…troubled."

She snorted, the most unladylike sound she could make on command, and clenched her teeth against the sobs still scraping at her throat. "You think?"

"Could I be of assistance?"

And then—she couldn't help it. Her eyes flashed to his face without her permission. He was watching her with a frown pulling down his eyebrows and compressing his lips, and the expression was so concerned that she almost told him—about the man who wasn't her father, and the man who was, and the hodge-podge of humans and fairies and assorted fanged and horned and goat-legged beasts who wanted her, her and a couple of other teenagers, to overthrow this man and his power-mad mother, to reestablish _hehyt_, whatever the hell that was, and bring peace back to this realm.

But some warning still lingering from the story made her afraid of what would happen to that hodge-podge of humans and fairies and assorted beasts if she told him. A part of her—a large part—ached to trust him, and that worried her.

"No," she said at last.

"There is nothing I can do to help you?" he said, as though clarifying what her "no" meant. Something in his expression changed, and although Emma couldn't decide what it was or what it meant, it made something inside her shiver.

It wasn't an entirely unpleasant shiver, either.

She was coming undone. She could feel it, the way everything was about to burst out and tear her to pieces. She pressed her face into her knees and gritted her teeth against the sensation.

She heard the prince stand and go back into his room, but he didn't close the door, and he came back a minute later, crouched beside her again, and held out a steaming cup of what smelled like hot chocolate. "Here," he said when she didn't take it right away. "This is the best remedy for rattled nerves."

Emma took the cup out of his hand and sipped it once. It _was_ hot chocolate. Real hot chocolate, made with milk and cream and cocoa and cinnamon. Perfect. She took a second, larger, sip. Warmth poured down her throat, coated her stomach, grabbed the thoughts spinning out of control through her mind and told them to shut up. "Mmm," she sighed and took another drink.

"Better?" the prince asked.

"Yes. Thanks."

"Anytime." He was quiet for a moment, then reached over with one hand and smoothed back a strand of hair that was lying against her cheek.

Emma didn't move, afraid that she might snap in two if she did.

"It's been a very long day for you," he whispered, stating, not asking, as if he knew what she'd been through since the queen's guard had nudged her awake—had it really only been this morning? It felt like years ago, as if she'd aged more in the last twenty-four hours than she had the entire seventeen years previous.

"I can't begin to imagine how difficult it must be," he continued. He was still stroking her hair, the way she might pet Salem to encourage him to come out of a corner, and she found that gentle touch even more comforting than the hot chocolate. "Returning after so many years in the Outer Realm—there is a reason long trips beyond the Door are discouraged."

She was so tired. So brutally, agonizingly exhausted.

"You should sleep. Nothing can make a difficult transition back into the Inner Realm easier than a good night's sleep."

Her head drooped to her knees again. Her eyelids were too heavy to hold open.

What was in that hot chocolate?

"It's all right, Lady Emma. You are safe with me. Can you believe that?"

She could. She did.

She was safe, and she was warm, and she was so tired that she couldn't think about anything but curling up and going to sleep.

Emma felt herself sagging toward the floor, her entire body slipping sideways as though she intended to drop off right here outside the prince's door, but something caught her before she'd made it all the way down. She felt an arm go around her back, another beneath her knees, and the odd sensation of being lifted, the way Dad used to pick her up and carry her to bed when she was very little.

Then there was a pillow under her head and a blanket over her shoulders, and the light that had been on flickered off, and, just before Emma lost consciousness entirely, she thought Prince Lyen stroked her hair one last time and whispered, "Sleep well, love."


	13. Warned

Emma woke with a strange fuzzy feeling in her head, like her brains had been replaced with cotton balls during the night, and it took her a moment of lying still and forcing herself to think before she was able to remember where she was.

Or, at least, that she was in a palace somewhere on the other side of what the locals called the Eighth Door, in some alternate fantasy world they called the Inner Realm. As to _exactly_ where she was, she couldn't quite be sure. She was fairly certain that she'd never been in this particular room before.

It was a bedroom—obviously; she was lying on a bed, a large one, at least a…was there a size bigger than king-sized?—but it was clearly a room that belonged to someone, a room that was often used. Not messy, but definitely lived-in: there was a large desk littered with paper against the far wall and a coat draped across the back of the desk chair. The nearby end table held an unbalanced stack of books and a small plate with a piece of toast on it.

Emma's stomach grumbled; she grabbed the toast and ate it in three bites, so quickly that she didn't think until after it was gone that perhaps it wasn't meant for her. Oh, well. It was cold, so, even if it wasn't for her, maybe the proper owner wouldn't mind too much.

She rolled out of the bed and stretched her arms above her head, popping her joints. She'd been asleep for a long time—she could feel the hours in the stiffness of her muscles and cotton-balled fuzziness of her head—but, otherwise, she felt okay, refreshed and awake once all the stiffness and sleep worked itself out of her system.

She wandered toward the desk and glanced half-curiously over the papers scattered across it. They all appeared very official, but they were written in a pictorial language like the hieroglyphs she'd seen on the throne room door, and she didn't have the slightest idea what they said.

One piece of paper caught her attention, though. It was maple-bark colored and looked like it was made with lots of little scraps, pressed together like particle board, and, when she looked down at it, she half-expected to see _100 Flynn Ave._ scrawled across it.

"Did you sleep well, my lady?"

Emma whirled around at the sound of the voice to see the prince standing near the doorway to the room. "What are you—" she started to say.

Then she remembered.

Oh.

_Oohh._

She was in _Prince Lyen's_ room.

That cleared the cotton from her head faster than she could blink.

She glanced down at herself, relieved to see that she was, from broken-zippered hoodie to double-knotted sneakers, fully clothed, and that the prince was carrying a blanket and pillow in from the next room. He half-smiled at her, as if amused by her reaction to what she was beginning to realize had been a perfectly polite and innocent greeting.

Emma's face flamed, hot enough to start a fire, and she pulled in a few deep breaths, urging herself to relax and answer him calmly. "Yes, I did, thanks. And thank you, too, for…you know…"

Prince Lyen lifted an eyebrow. "For not dishonoring you last night?"

"Yeah."

She meant thanks for the hot chocolate and the toast, but the word slipped out of her mouth before she could stop it.

His expression turned offended, and Emma's hot face got hotter. "I mean, no. I wasn't…I meant, thanks for last night. For…being there."

"Ah. You are sincerely welcome." He looked at her for a moment, a speculative frown pressing his lips together. "If I may ask—"

"Please, don't," Emma interrupted.

"As you wish."

He nodded once and glanced down at her hands, and she realized that she was crumpling that particle-board paper in her fists. She didn't think her face could get any hotter, but she proved herself wrong, because it did. "I'm sorry," she said, setting the paper back on the desk and smoothing it out as best she could. "I didn't read them. I…can't. How is it that everyone speaks English here anyway?"

It was an unsubtle and graceless change of subject, but it worked, and it was something that Emma had been wondering about in the quiet seconds that she hadn't been thinking of other, more important, things. Prince Lyen frowned, with confusion this time. "English?"

"It's what you're speaking."

"No, I'm speaking Hyashe."

"Hyashe?" Emma assumed that was a language. "Then how can I understand you?"

"The Door removes the language barriers that might prevent effective communication." He smiled. "You hear me speaking English, and I hear you speaking Hyashe. That's one of its powers, and one of the reasons going through it can be difficult."

"You mean, this Door of yours, it's pulling a TARDIS on me?"

"I'm sorry?"

Emma shook her head. "Okay, not the place. But it's…translating your words inside my head?"

"That's one to say it. Maybe not the most accurate description of what it does, but, essentially, yes."

Emma sat down on the edge of the bed. "This place is so frickin' weird," she muttered under her breath, hopefully not loud enough for him to hear.

"Are you all right?"

"Oh, yeah. Peachy." The sarcasm in her voice was so thick she thought she might choke on it. Then she sighed and looked up at him and tried very hard not to sound like a five-year-old. "Can I go back to my room now?"

Prince Lyen smiled again, broadly, showing teeth. "I'll summon a servant."

It was Hywatha who answered him. Her eyes flashed once between Emma and the prince, then dropped to the floor with a trace of a frown tugging at her eyebrows, but she curtsied and said, "You asked for me," before Emma could insist that it wasn't what it looked like.

Great. Just wonderful. Not only did she have this insane fantasy-story past, but now she was going to have a _reputation_, too.

"Take Lady Emma back to her own room," Prince Lyen said.

Hywatha curtsied again. "If you'll follow me, my lady."

Emma obeyed, fiddling with the zipper on her hoodie; as she passed by the prince, her gaze flickered up to him. She had no idea what expression was on her face, and she could only hope that it wasn't desperation.

"And, Hywatha?" he said suddenly, stopping the fairy girl just as she was about to cross into the hallway. He leveled her with a glare that reminded Emma of the queen's. "Don't speak a word of this to anyone. Either of you," he added, now looking over to include Emma in the glare.

His order lacked the implacable and irresistible power of his mother's, but it still fell on Emma like a ton of bricks. Her head dropped, a half-nod, and Hywatha curtsied again. "Yes, sir," they both mumbled, not quite in unison.

Prince Lyen flicked a hand toward them, a bored, princely gesture of dismissal. "Go now."

And, completely unexpectedly, Emma's throat tightened like she might start crying.

_Well, what did you expect, for him to kiss your hand and bid you a fond farewell?_ she chided herself, following Hywatha down the hall away from his room. And then everything inside her burned as she realized…that she kind of had expected—hoped for—just that. _God, Emma, could you _be_ more ridiculous?_

They were quiet for while, Hywatha shooting her furtive glances every couple of steps, until the hallway they were walking down started to look familiar. Emma hurried the last few feet to her bedroom door, eager to escape, and had almost made it through when Hywatha laid a hand on her arm. "My lady?" she began in a whisper.

Emma turned and glared at her. "It's not what you think," she said quickly.

"Isn't it?"

"No. I didn't…we didn't—"

"I know," Hywatha interrupted.

"Then why do you keep looking at me like that?"

"We're all worried for you, my lady."

"Worried that I might not want any part of what you're planning and ruin everything for your little rebellion, you mean."

Hywatha shook her head; her wings fluttered once in agitation. "No. We're worried for _you_. You took the news so…so hard last night, and we're worried that they may try to…take advantage of that."

"I don't know what you mean," Emma said.

"The prince, my lady."

She tugged her arm out from beneath Hywatha's fingers. Her voice turned defensive. "What about him?"

"He, more than anyone, is in Her Majesty's power. He's not to be trusted."

"Oh." Emma laughed, cold and mirthless. "And what do you people know about who to trust? One of you is the man who's been lying to me for the past _seventeen years_!"

"My lady, please—"

"Don't. Don't even try. The prince has been nothing but kind to me—the only person in this entire _realm_"—she snarled the word—"who has been."

"We just don't want you in any more danger then you already are." Her voice was strained with sincerity, but Emma had heard enough. She stepped back and slammed the door.


	14. Decided

That was it. She was done. Done. Emma sat on her bed for a while, trying to decide if she remembered how to get back to the Door, then, when she realized that she didn't, how she might go about finding it anyway. Wandering the halls seemed like a bad idea—there were too many people she wanted to avoid who she just might stumble across if she took to the halls—but she had no better ideas.

It didn't matter. She was going home. She didn't care if she didn't really belong at home anymore, not the way she thought she did; Mom still loved her, and she still had to graduate high school and go to college and do something with her insignificant little life. She was going home, and maybe it wouldn't be like it was before, but it would be better than being held against her will in this place.

So there it was. She was leaving.

Emma stood up, took a habitual look around her to make sure she had everything she came with—which was silly, because she'd come with nothing but the clothes she was still wearing—marched across the room, and opened the door.

But there was someone already waiting for her on the other side.

Emma spun around and slammed the door shut again. "Go away," she snarled.

Hywatha was quick, she had to give the fairy girl that. Emma had only been in the room a few minutes.

"Emmy," he said back, his voice muffled by the door, "can we talk?"

"No. You'll only lie to me again."

"Emma Melinda Green. Open this door right now."

Emma leaned her back against the door for a moment, her shoulders hunching slightly almost on instinct. Mom would sometimes take that tone and use her full name when meting out a rare punishment, but Dad never did. He'd never needed to before.

She pushed herself away from the door and opened it, only wide enough so that she could brace her shoulders between the door and the frame, but still opened it.

He looked down at her for a minute in silence so heavy Emma could feel it straightening her wild ringlets. Then, finally: "You were with Prince Lyen last night?"

"Nothing happened!" Emma said fiercely, for what felt like the hundredth time. "He found me crying in the hallway outside his room and gave me a cup of hot chocolate to make me feel better. I…fell asleep and woke up in his room with even my _shoes_ still on, and he slept in a chair in the other room. Nothing. Happened." She put every bit of energy she had into the last two words.

"It's all right, I believe you."

"So, what? You're here to tell me that he's not to be trusted? Because Hywatha's already delivered that message."

"No." He shook his head. "I actually came to check on you. See how you're doing. You were so upset last night—"

"Well, I'm doing great." Emma took half-a-step back without letting go of the doorknob and held her arms out, inviting an inspection. "See? Wonderful. Planning to dance a jig."

He didn't respond right away, and, when he did, his voice was thick. "I'm sorry, Emmy. Every day I'd wake up and decide today was the day to tell you, but then you'd come down the stairs, and I couldn't. Whatever your DNA might say doesn't matter—you _are_ my daughter."

"So why now? Why put Mom and me through two weeks of hell, then drag me here to tell me?" Emma felt her throat tightening, and she spoke quickly, trying to get the questions out before it could finish closing.

He glanced around the empty hallway. "Can I come in?"

She didn't answer, and he read her silence as suspicion and lowered his voice to a whisper. "Please, give me a chance to explain. Things are happening, Emmy. Important things that the queen can't know about if they're going to succeed."

Emma blew out a gusty sigh and stepped away from the door, leaving it open as an invitation to follow. He closed the door behind them, and they sat in the chairs pulled up to the fireplace. "This world is built on several checks and balances, not completely unlike the US government," he said after a moment staring into the bare fireplace. "There's the royalty, which you might call the president, and the parliament is, well, a parliament. Congress."

Emma tried to understand what he was saying, where he was going with this. She owed him that much, at least. "So, this hehate or whatever, it's kind of the Supreme Court?"

"Exactly," he said with a smile, the same kind of proud-daddy smile he always gave her when she came home with a report card full of A's. "The biggest difference is that only the parliament is elected. Royalty, unfortunately, is a born right, and the Four…reveal themselves, usually at around six months when they first show some inclination of their…talents."

"Like my thing with the wind?"

He nodded.

"I was a lot older than six months when that was, uh, revealed," she said, thinking of Sophie Turner's eighth birthday party. Though, she remembered, that wasn't the first time she'd done something with the wind—even still, she'd been at least five years old the first time she "found" them a breeze on a hot summer day.

"That's because you were beyond the Door. Things from the other side don't work quite right when they go through the Door."

A sudden flash of understanding, like a light flicking on in her head, made Emma sit up a little straighter. "My watch stopped when I went into that warehouse."

"And, had you been carrying a cell phone…" He faded off, reached into one of his pant pockets, and offered her the phone he pulled out. She flipped it open curiously. The screen was flickering and staticy like the picture on an overused VHS.

"That's weird," she muttered and handed it back.

"It's been like that the whole time. I was hoping it would get some signal at some point so I could call…" He faded off for a second, his eyes unfocusing, but then shook his head and continued. "But the Four aren't the only ones who have power. It runs in the royal line as well. Jianya is the most powerful queen, the most powerful royal, we've ever seen."

Emma thought about the queen in the throne room telling her to stop, come back, sit down, and didn't doubt that.

"She took over, Emma. The new Four are usually grown and trained by the time the old Four retire or die, but this time, for some reason, you weren't even born until the old Four were already long past their times. And when Jianya saw how vulnerable the _hehyt_ had become, with the old Four too old and you far too young, she killed them, stripped the parliament of all its power, and has ruled this realm without kindness or mercy for nearly seventeen years." His voice was tense by the end, his words coming fast the way they did when he was excited or worried.

Emma tossed her hands out. "Okay, I get it. She's evil. But what do you want _me_ to do about it?"

He considered her for a moment, and, for that moment, he was her daddy again, cuddling with her on the couch, teaching her to parallel park, swinging her around in their daily home-from-work hug, and the reminder hurt so fiercely that her heart stuttered over its next beat.

She bit her lip, looked down, spoke quietly. "Take me to the Door."

"Emma—"

"Please."

He sighed. "Would you come and meet the others first?"

Emma considered. The other three kids had been just on the edge of last night's rebellion powwow, and she hadn't spared any of them a second thought since the one boy stopped her from tearing apart the room. "Will you take me to the Door after?"

"Yes," he said, his voice as serious as a promise.

She blew out a breath. "All right, then."


End file.
